Zinn’s History

Every fall, the freshmen troop into town tugging laundry bags stuffed with extra-long fitted sheets and trunks packed with aspirations, Scrabble, and socks. The next week, when they gather around the seminar table with their laptops cocked, the brashest are the kids who read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” in high school. It got them thinking and gave them something to argue about, aside from how to cram for the AP and whether the DBQ ought to count for more than the multiple choice. Zinn doesn’t come up in scholarly journals, but he introduced a whole lot of people who hadn’t thought about it before to the idea that history has a point of view. Kids can figure this out all on their own, but it’s nice to read it in a book. I suspect that reading “A People’s History” at fourteen is a bit like reading “The Catcher in the Rye” at the same age (history’s so goddam phony): it’s swell and terrible and it feels like something has ended, because it has.

Zinn wanted to write a people’s history because he believed that a national history serves only to justify the existence of the nation, which means, mainly, that it lies, and if it ever tells the truth, it tells it too fast, racing past atrocity to dwell on glory. Zinn’s history did the reverse. Instead of lionizing Andrew Jackson, he mourned the Cherokee. The problem is that, analytically, upending isn’t an advance; it’s more of the same, only upside-down. By sophomore year, the young whippersnappers have figured that out, too, which can be heartbreaking to watch, but it doesn’t make them any less grateful for what Zinn taught them, or any less fond of him for having braved it. Come September, the freshmen will be back, Zinn on their Kindles, zeal in their striped messenger bags, and I’ll be awfully glad to see them.

Jill Lepore is a staff writer and a professor of history at Harvard. “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” is her latest book.